Wealth Makes Us Worse

Mike Springer flags the above video, which features controversial research showing that wealthier people are more likely to lie, steal, and break the law:

Perhaps most surprising, as this story by PBS NewsHour economics reporter Paul Solman shows, is that the tendency for unethical behavior appears not only in people who are actually rich, but in those who are manipulated into feeling that they are rich. As UC Berkeley social psychologist Paul Piff says, the results are statistical in nature but the trend is clear. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine,“the rich are way more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”